It’s official. As Kathleen Nelson reports in the Saturday Post, the Tour of Missouri is on the next year’s  UCI calendar (use drop-down menu under Calendar; click America Tour).  So raise a glass of Missouri wine and drink a toast:  the successful ToM will be back for an encore performance. Awesome.

The dates are Sept. 9 through Sept. 14, a Tuesday through Sunday like this year, again competing with the Vuelta a Espana, but setting up nicely for the World Championships Sept. 24 to Sept. 28.

Meanwhile, there’s no mention on the UCI calendar of the Tour of America, a   cockamamie 4-week, 4,000-mile super grand tour proposed for next year by Frank Arokiasamy — who’s described as  a business consultant with a PhD in economics.  

While a Tour of America would be super cool, it ain’t gonna happen, not like this.  The race and stages are way too long;  some members  of the pro peloton believe the grand tours (the Tour de France, the Girio d’Italia and the Vuelta) are too long now at 3-weeks and 2,000-some miles, let alone a four-week trek of 4,000 miles with 200-mile stages no matter how much money Arokiasamy says the race will pay out.

The press release and press conference touting the Tour of America generated quite the buzz at the InterBike fest in Las Vegas, and Arokiasamy’s website  got a lot of traffic the first day. This was  because, unbelieveably, Velonews ran with  the story on the first day, using only the press release  as the basis for its story  and failing  to do  even basic reporting about the veracity of the release’s claim — that the  Tour of America  was planned  for next September and October.  

Kathleen questioned the initial story from the start, because she knew the deadline for applying for  UCI sanctioning for 2008 events was June 1st. So  it  took  her, like,  one phone call to confirm her suspicion, that ToA  hasn’t been  sanctioned by either UCI or USA Cycling and is absolutely  a  no-go.

Velonews spiked its original story —  no surprise there; twas an embarrassment. But even  its followup from the second-day interview didn’t do any serious debunking until the end of the tome. To its credit, Velonews expressed suspicion, along with its readers, in  its  Wednesday Mailbag, and Patrick O’Grady has a humorous take on ToA  in Friday’s Foaming Rant.

Velonews usually is on top of  the cycling news, covering  live events and tracking scoops within the pro pelotons about riders switching teams,  directors moving on, sponsors bailing out, and what not. In fact, that happenin’ Neal Rogers cat of Velonews is a reporter for the 21st century. Watched him work at the Tour of Mo, and dude works hard. He works the room  by the team cars before and after the stages, files spot-on stories, gets things posted quickly, and is as adept with a microphone and a camera as he is with a laptop keyboard. Looks like he has the respect of the  athletes as well, a big plus in getting the good scoops in any sport.

That said, Velonews did drop the ball initially by  playing it straight and using only the press release as a source for the original ToA story. But, hey, nobody’s perfect. 10 Speed certainly ain’t — uh, isn’t.

Cyclingnews.com  also used  just the press release for its initial coverage, but its  item about the America tour was limtied to three paragraphs and was buried near the bottom of its Latest Cyclling News of Sept. 26  and its followup Under the Microscope followup Saturday is primo.

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